Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1796 page)

When he ‘came to,’ as the phrase goes, he was a startling object to look at, with his colourless face, his sunken cheeks, his wild black eyes, and his long black hair.  The first question he asked me about himself, when he could speak, made me suspect that I had been called in to a man in my own profession.  I mentioned to him my surmise; and he told me that I was right.

He said he had come last from Paris, where he had been attached to a hospital.  That he had lately returned to England, on his way to Edinburgh, to continue his studies; that he had been taken ill on the journey; and that he had stopped to rest and recover himself at Doncaster.  He did not add a word about his name, or who he was: and, of course, I did not question him on the subject.  All I inquired, when he ceased speaking, was what branch of the profession he intended to follow.

‘Any branch,’ he said, bitterly, ‘which will put bread into the mouth of a poor man.’

At this, Arthur, who had been hitherto watching him in silent curiosity, burst out impetuously in his usual good-humoured way:-

‘My dear fellow!’ (everybody was ‘my dear fellow’ with Arthur) ‘now you have come to life again, don’t begin by being down-hearted about your prospects.  I’ll answer for it, I can help you to some capital thing in the medical line — or, if I can’t, I know my father can.’

The medical student looked at him steadily.

‘Thank you,’ he said, coldly.  Then added, ‘May I ask who your father is?’

‘He’s well enough known all about this part of the country,’ replied Arthur.  ‘He is a great manufacturer, and his name is Holliday.’

My hand was on the man’s wrist during this brief conversation.  The instant the name of Holliday was pronounced I felt the pulse under my fingers flutter, stop, go on suddenly with a bound, and beat afterwards, for a minute or two, at the fever rate.

‘How did you come here?’ asked the stranger, quickly, excitably, passionately almost.

Arthur related briefly what had happened from the time of his first taking the bed at the inn.

‘I am indebted to Mr. Holliday’s son then for the help that has saved my life,’ said the medical student, speaking to himself, with a singular sarcasm in his voice.  ‘Come here!’

He held out, as he spoke, his long, white, bony, right hand.

‘With all my heart,’ said Arthur, taking the hand-cordially.  ‘I may confess it now,’ he continued, laughing.  ‘Upon my honour, you almost frightened me out of my wits.’

The stranger did not seem to listen.  His wild black eyes were fixed with a look of eager interest on Arthur’s face, and his long bony fingers kept tight hold of Arthur’s hand.  Young Holliday, on his side, returned the gaze, amazed and puzzled by the medical student’s odd language and manners.  The two faces were close together; I looked at them; and, to my amazement, I was suddenly impressed by the sense of a likeness between them — not in features, or complexion, but solely in expression.  It must have been a strong likeness, or I should certainly not have found it out, for I am naturally slow at detecting resemblances between faces.

‘You have saved my life,’ said the strange man, still looking hard in Arthur’s face, still holding tightly by his hand.  ‘If you had been my own brother, you could not have done more for me than that.’

He laid a singularly strong emphasis on those three words ‘my own brother,’ and a change passed over his face as he pronounced them, — a change that no language of mine is competent to describe.

‘I hope I have not done being of service to you yet,’ said Arthur.  ‘I’ll speak to my father, as soon as I get home.’

‘You seem to be fond and proud of your father,’ said the medical student.  ‘I suppose, in return, he is fond and proud of you?’

‘Of course, he is!’ answered Arthur, laughing.  ‘Is there anything wonderful in that?  Isn’t
your
father fond — ’

The stranger suddenly dropped young Holliday’s hand, and turned his face away.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Arthur.  ‘I hope I have not unintentionally pained you.  I hope you have not lost your father.’

‘I can’t well lose what I have never had,’ retorted the medical student, with a harsh, mocking laugh.

‘What you have never had!’

The strange man suddenly caught Arthur’s hand again, suddenly looked once more hard in his face.

‘Yes,’ he said, with a repetition of the bitter laugh.  ‘You have brought a poor devil back into the world, who has no business there.  Do I astonish you?  Well!  I have a fancy of my own for telling you what men in my situation generally keep a secret.  I have no name and no father.  The merciful law of Society tells me I am Nobody’s Son!  Ask your father if he will be my father too, and help me on in life with the family name.’

Arthur looked at me, more puzzled than ever.  I signed to him to say nothing, and then laid my fingers again on the man’s wrist.  No!  In spite of the extraordinary speech that he had just made, he was not, as I had been disposed to suspect, beginning to get light-headed.  His pulse, by this time, had fallen back to a quiet, slow beat, and his skin was moist and cool.  Not a symptom of fever or agitation about him.

Finding that neither of us answered him, he turned to me, and began talking of the extraordinary nature of his case, and asking my advice about the future course of medical treatment to which he ought to subject himself.  I said the matter required careful thinking over, and suggested that I should submit certain prescriptions to him the next morning.  He told me to write them at once, as he would, most likely, be leaving Doncaster, in the morning, before I was up.  It was quite useless to represent to him the folly and danger of such a proceeding as this.  He heard me politely and patiently, but held to his resolution, without offering any reasons or any explanations, and repeated to me, that if I wished to give him a chance of seeing my prescription, I must write it at once.  Hearing this, Arthur volunteered the loan of a travelling writing-case, which, he said, he had with him; and, bringing it to the bed, shook the note-paper out of the pocket of the case forthwith in his usual careless way.  With the paper, there fell out on the counterpane of the bed a small packet of sticking-plaster, and a little water-colour drawing of a landscape.

The medical student took up the drawing and looked at it.  His eye fell on some initials neatly written, in cypher, in one corner.  He started and trembled; his pale face grew whiter than ever; his wild black eyes turned on Arthur, and looked through and through him.

‘A pretty drawing,’ he said in a remarkably quiet tone of voice.

‘Ah! and done by such a pretty girl,’ said Arthur.  ‘Oh, such a pretty girl!  I wish it was not a landscape — I wish it was a portrait of her!’

‘You admire her very much?’

Arthur, half in jest, half in earnest, kissed his hand for answer.

‘Love at first sight!’ he said, putting the drawing away again.  ‘But the course of it doesn’t run smooth.  It’s the old story.  She’s monopolised as usual.  Trammelled by a rash engagement to some poor man who is never likely to get money enough to marry her.  It was lucky I heard of it in time, or I should certainly have risked a declaration when she gave me that drawing.  Here, doctor!  Here is pen, ink, and paper all ready for you.’

‘When she gave you that drawing?  Gave it.  Gave it.’  He repeated the words slowly to himself, and suddenly closed his eyes.  A momentary distortion passed across his face, and I saw one of his hands clutch up the bedclothes and squeeze them hard.  I thought he was going to be ill again, and begged that there might be no more talking.  He opened his eyes when I spoke, fixed them once more searchingly on Arthur, and said, slowly and distinctly, ‘You like her, and she likes you.  The poor man may die out of your way.  Who can tell that she may not give you herself as well as her drawing, after all?’

Before young Holliday could answer, he turned to me, and said in a whisper, ‘Now for the prescription.’  From that time, though he spoke to Arthur again, he never looked at him more.

When I had written the prescription, he examined it, approved of it, and then astonished us both by abruptly wishing us good night.  I offered to sit up with him, and he shook his head.  Arthur offered to sit up with him, and he said, shortly, with his face turned away, ‘No.’  I insisted on having somebody left to watch him.  He gave way when he found I was determined, and said he would accept the services of the waiter at the Inn.

‘Thank you, both,’ he said, as we rose to go.  ‘I have one last favour to ask — not of you, doctor, for I leave you to exercise your professional discretion — but of Mr. Holliday.’  His eyes, while he spoke, still rested steadily on me, and never once turned towards Arthur.  ‘I beg that Mr. Holliday will not mention to any one — least of all to his father — the events that have occurred, and the words that have passed, in this room.  I entreat him to bury me in his memory, as, but for him, I might have been buried in my grave.  I cannot give my reasons for making this strange request.  I can only implore him to grant it.’

His voice faltered for the first time, and he hid his face on the pillow.  Arthur, completely bewildered, gave the required pledge.  I took young Holliday away with me, immediately afterwards, to the house of my friend; determining to go back to the Inn, and to see the medical student again before he had left in the morning.

I returned to the Inn at eight o’clock, purposely abstaining from waking Arthur, who was sleeping off the past night’s excitement on one of my friend’s sofas.  A suspicion had occurred to me as soon as I was alone in my bedroom, which made me resolve that Holliday and the stranger whose life he had saved should not meet again, if I could prevent it.  I have already alluded to certain reports, or scandals, which I knew of, relating to the early life of Arthur’s father.  While I was thinking, in my bed, of what had passed at the Inn — of the change in the student’s pulse when he heard the name of Holliday; of the resemblance of expression that I had discovered between his face and Arthur’s; of the emphasis he had laid on those three words, ‘my own brother;’ and of his incomprehensible acknowledgment of his own illegitimacy — while I was thinking of these things, the reports I have mentioned suddenly flew into my mind, and linked themselves fast to the chain of my previous reflections.  Something within me whispered, ‘It is best that those two young men should not meet again.’  I felt it before I slept; I felt it when I woke; and I went, as I told you, alone to the Inn the next morning.

I had missed my only opportunity of seeing my nameless patient again.  He had been gone nearly an hour when I inquired for him.

I have now told you everything that I know for certain, in relation to the man whom I brought back to life in the double-bedded room of the Inn at Doncaster.  What I have next to add is matter for inference and surmise, and is not, strictly speaking, matter of fact.

I have to tell you, first, that the medical student turned out to be strangely and unaccountably right in assuming it as more than probable that Arthur Holliday would marry the young lady who had given him the water-colour drawing of the landscape.  That marriage took place a little more than a year after the events occurred which I have just been relating.  The young couple came to live in the neighbourhood in which I was then established in practice.  I was present at the wedding, and was rather surprised to find that Arthur was singularly reserved with me, both before and after his marriage, on the subject of the young lady’s prior engagement.  He only referred to it once, when we were alone, merely telling me, on that occasion, that his wife had done all that honour and duty required of her in the matter, and that the engagement had been broken off with the full approval of her parents.  I never heard more from him than this.  For three years he and his wife lived together happily.  At the expiration of that time, the symptoms of a serious illness first declared themselves in Mrs. Arthur Holliday.  It turned out to be a long, lingering, hopeless malady.  I attended her throughout.  We had been great friends when she was well, and we became more attached to each other than ever when she was ill.  I had many long and interesting conversations with her in the intervals when she suffered least.  The result of one of these conversations I may briefly relate, leaving you to draw any inferences from it that you please.

The interview to which I refer, occurred shortly before her death.  I called one evening, as usual, and found her alone, with a look in her eyes which told me that she had been crying.  She only informed me at first, that she had been depressed in spirits; but, by little and little, she became more communicative, and confessed to me that she had been looking over some old letters, which had been addressed to her, before she had seen Arthur, by a man to whom she had been engaged to be married.  I asked her how the engagement came to be broken off.  She replied that it had not been broken off, but that it had died out in a very mysterious way.  The person to whom she was engaged — her first love, she called him — was very poor, and there was no immediate prospect of their being married.  He followed my profession, and went abroad to study.  They had corresponded regularly, until the time when, as she believed, he had returned to England.  From that period she heard no more of him.  He was of a fretful, sensitive temperament; and she feared that she might have inadvertently done or said something that offended him.  However that might be, he had never written to her again; and, after waiting a year, she had married Arthur.  I asked when the first estrangement had begun, and found that the time at which she ceased to hear anything of her first lover exactly corresponded with the time at which I had been called in to my mysterious patient at The Two Robins Inn.